1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer processing and, more particularly, to restoring electronic documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computer memory storage and data bandwidth increase, so does the amount and complexity of data that business and industry manage on a daily basis. A large portion of the data that must be managed in an enterprise involves electronic documents. Electronic documents may be managed for a company or workgroup by a dedicated server, which manages and stores both intra-office and external document transmissions.
This type of electronic document server is often configured as an enterprise information portal, which provides employees and customers the ability to search and access corporate information, including electronic documents. The enterprise information portal can serve as the single gateway to log into the corporate network and retrieve electronic documents. It is noted that enterprise information portals are typically secure and private (also known as intranet portals), but also may include external gateways for wider or even public access.
An enterprise information portal often includes a back-end database system, which may serve as the document management system. The back-end database system can store data in the form of electronic documents, metadata and other content associated with the portal, such as web pages. The back-end database in an enterprise information portal can be a variant of a stand-alone database system, which has been configured for document and content management.
Because electronic documents frequently contain crucial information, the contents of electronic document servers (e.g., an enterprise information portal along with its back-end database) may be archived, or backed up, to an archival storage to prevent loss or corruption of data. In particular, a back-end database is often backed up as a single database file, which contains all the tables, records, and indexing information for the database.
Thus it would be desirable to restore individual data objects from an unmounted database file, without having to reinstall the database system.